Cafe Chantant
by tailchaser
Summary: In a time of great turmoil in the wizarding world, Albus Dumbledore returns to where the saga of his life began: a once proud, broken down little restaurant on the outskirts of Hogsmeade. And remembers. This will be romance/drama in later chapters.


Café Chantant - tailchaser  
  
Out beyond the boundaries of Hogsmeade stands a little restaurant with tin for a door and boards across its windows. As people pass it, their eyes jump over it, due to no warding spell save the sheer misery of its appearance. Maybe it had been grand once, but there are few alive now who can remember it as anything other than pitiful, and many who believe it built that way on purpose, for dark and gloomy purposes unknown.  
  
For Albus Dumbledore, the weathered boards and cracked, pitted paving stones tell quite a different story...  
  
"You know, if you worked a bit harder now, you'd have more time off to play later," Rosemary said teasingly, dumping her pile of dirty linen into the battered wash-basket. "I'm not playing, I'm polishing," replied Albus, without looking up from the glistening supper table and the rhythmic movement of the rag across the surface. "I can see my face in that already. Why don't you polish the rest of the room, if you like it so much?"  
"Because the table needs it," the seven year old responded seriously, and the girl stared at him in exasperation. "Honestly, Albus!" She rolled her eyes. "You're more of a pest than you are a help. Go on, get a move on!" Rosemary snatched the broom leaning against the tavern wall and pretended to swat him with it. The boy jumped, but started to clean the backs of the chairs. "That's more like it, then," she said, and grinned at him. "If you finish that quick enough, I'll let you go down to the village for me, there's a few things I need and I'll let you buy sweets with the change." Feeling in her pockets, she produced a handful of knuts, a few keys, a hair ribbon and sticky, yellow cluster. "You want this?" she asked Albus, eyeing it dubiously.   
"Can I?" he asked quickly. Rosemary picked most of the fluff off it and carefully put it in his open mouth. Somehow, he managed to say "lemon drops!" without gluing his mouth together. "Looks more honeyed cockroach to me," she shrugged, dropping the keys and the ribbon back into her pockets, leaving the money on the table. "If I can find a parchment, I'll write out what I need. Back in a moment - don't stop working!"  
Albus giggled around his sweet and rubbed the chairs down as quickly as he could. Upstairs, he could hear Rosemary singing loudly and tunelessly as she hunted for paper and quill.   
  
All of his seven years he'd loved to hear her sing. Albus cheerfully admitted he couldn't carry a song in a bucket (though he could imagine himself creating a spell that made it possible, to the admiration and adoration of people everywhere), while his sister had a voice that stopped crowds: harsh, loud and out-of-tune. This year had been her last at Hogwarts, where she'd put it to good use it commentating quidditch matches. He knew her secret dream was to play quidditch professionally, but then, you needed money to be a professional player, to buy your gear and things, and all they had was the money from the tavern. Albus had a few knuts he'd managed to save up, and when he'd saved some more, he was going to buy Rosemary a broom. Only the best players had their own brooms, since pre-made ones were very expensive, but he was determined that she was going to get something better than the magicked branch she flew around the village.  
  
Finished the polishing, Albus threw his rag down with a loud 'whoop' as Rosemary raced back into the room, waving a long parchment list still dripping with ink. "Here! Don't forget the pickled spiders, they're very important! And the honey is for Mama, to stop her coughing, so mind you bring the best pot you can find!"  
  
"Ah, yes, the broom," Headmaster Dumbledore murmured to himself, sitting carefully on the worn floor of the old tavern building. Only the main room was still standing now, the outbuildings and the upper floor lost to fire many years ago. The building seemed to be folding in on itself, getting smaller as the years got longer, and his childhood grew further and further away.  
  
The broom was a long, bumpy model with 'Volatus' printed on the handle. Master Filius, who owned the oddments store which boasted to have everything anyone could ever want, displayed it in his window with the reverence it deserved. Albus, like all the village children, spent days with his nose glued to the window gazing at it in rapture. Someone, usually Rosemary, would have to come along and forcefully steer him home. When his sister was at school, Albus had nearly a free range of everything Hogsmeade had to offer. The other adults kept an eye on him, because they knew that Sarah Dumbledore, behind all the polite fiction, was too sick to mind what her offspring was doing.   
  
He hadn't been very old when Mama had started coughing. And Albus, who prided himself on being able to count when he was three, knew that meant he'd been very young indeed. Honey helped, and so did the potions Vali Imsworth brewed, but they couldn't stop the long hours in bed when her lungs tried to turn themselves inside out, and she was too weak to take care of herself. Vali, a talented mediwitch, always looked sombre when she left their house.   
  
Sometimes Albus would sit with Rosemary and she would tell him what she thought about Mama's illness, and he would ask questions until she shooed him away with cries of 'little pest!' But those sessions with Rosemary were the only chance he got to talk about it, since nobody else wanted to discuss Sarah's sickness with a child. Papa least of all.  
  
He was a tall, sombre man as many years older than Mama as Rosemary was than Albus, with flaxen hair, weathered skin and a broken-looking nose. Both children looked much like him, except that Rosemary had her mother's dark hair and darker eyes.   
  
During term time Papa's presence was a rare, silent one, but Albus was used to this by now. He never came home much in the holidays, when Rosemary was around, and Mama was ill. After Mama died, he never came home at all. 


End file.
